Why You Need This: How would you like to make better contact in the golf swing?

How do you make sure the face is square at contact?

If you’re looking to make the ball go farther, this video, "Shallow the Golf Club" is for you.

We have the golf swing and your total game broken down to the 5 Real Fundamentals in the Top Speed Golf System.

In this video, I’ll cover why to shallow the club and I'll give you a great drill to work on to ingrain it.

All while improving key Real Fundamentals!

Start having real control of your game.

Be able to hit any shot in golf!

We’ll teach you.

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Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 9:05

Video Transcription:

All right, shallowing that club. We see these pros getting this club perfectly shallow as they’re starting their downswing. Everything’s nice and in the slot.

From there, all we have to do is turn through as hard as you can, it’s going to deliver the club very consistently and very powerfully through the golf ball.

We see the pros up and down the PGA Tour, all doing this very, very similarly. So why is it so dag-gone hard for most players to get that club shallow?

If shallowing the club is so much easier to strike the ball well, wouldn’t we all just be shallowing the club? How does that get started?

That’s exactly what I’m going to talk about in this video. I’m going to talk about why almost all players struggle getting steep where that originally comes from, and how that develops throughout the swing.

Then I’m going to give you a sure-fire way to shallow the club that actually has nothing to do with the angle of this shaft that will help to start happening more naturally.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so let’s jump right in to it. Now the reason we want to shallow, the reason why this is so good, when this club shallows out kind of below the direction our hands are moving, so kind of imagine a plane that our hands are moving down, or an angle our hands are moving down.

If I can get that club shallower than that, that set my club up on a great angle to where now as I’m coming through contact, I can be very consistent.

So you can imagine a plane of glass, this isn’t exactly what’s happening, but it’s a good visual for your mind.

Imagine this plane of glass, if I can get that club set on that plane of glass and rotate through and release on that plane of glass as I’m coming on through, that can really help the consistency of my golf shots.

So how do we get off of this? If that’s so good, seems like everybody would just start right from the beginning, releasing on that plane of glass.

Now I think most players do actually start somewhat kind of on that angle. They start similar to this plane of glass, but what ends up happening, is we don’t know how to release the face yet.

If I have this visual in my mind, when I’m very first beginning golf, and this is the same way I started, I bet you started this same way too.

If I’m just going to swing this club and pull the handle of the club toward the target as hard as I can, what ends up happening is if I swing nice and shallow and on plane, because I’m dragging this handle toward the target, look at my face. It’s wide open.

So if I hit a shot like this, you’ll notice I’ll be nice and shallow, but I’ll have the idea of just pulling my handle toward the target as hard as I can, I’m probably going to have a big block slice.

Hopefully I don’t hit a house on the right side. I’ll try to tone it down a little bit. Oh geeze, that’s way over there. Sorry to the neighbors. Hopefully I didn’t hit anything.

But I had it nice and shallow, I pulled the handle toward the target, and now the club face is wide open.

So even if you start out shallowing out the club, you start out on the right track, you get some pretty negative feedback right away when that ball goes 45-50 yards to the right and then slices even more. That’s the way everybody starts.

So from there, we say OK, what can I do to fix that?

Well, instead of doing the correct way which we’ll talk about here in a little bit, which has to do with what we’re doing with the handle, the natural inclination is to say OK, I’m going to come over the top.

Now I’ll start to get a little steeper and over the top, and I get that ball, again, I’m not getting rid of the slice, but I’m taking that slice and I’m moving it over to the left side.

So now it starts down the left side in the left rough, it slices back into the middle of the fairway, and I’m hitting the ball in play, at least.

I went from on plane dragging the club out of bounds, my fix actually made my swing worse, now I start to come steep and over the top, but I got the ball in play. So it’s giving me kind of positive feedback.

As you continue to get better, you probably get some lessons, saying OK, we’ve got this big slice now, let’s get rid of this thing.

Instead of taking that steeper swing and shallowing it out, we end up taking that steep swing, we can imagine that pane of glass kind of coming this way, or that swing direction coming this way, and we’re steep, we end up just tilting all that to the inside.

Now we’re steep and coming inside out and trying to release that club and flip with our hands to release the club.

In all three of those variations, we’ve kind of made manipulations that have gone around from the main thing that we should be working on.

We started out on plane with the face wide open. We fixed that by coming steep and over the top, and then we fixed that by dropping inside. We’re still steep, but now we’re flipping the hands.

So what’s the one piece that’s missing from all three of these scenarios, and that’s how to square the club up properly with the hands. That’s exactly what I’m going to go over next in this drill.

All right, so now let’s go through the progression, and again to recap on this, the only way I can come in on plane is to make sure that I square this face up.

That squaring of the face comes from rotating this handle. So if I’m looking from down the line, here’s my club face straight up and down. Here’s the butt end of my club.

If I’m rotating that just like a clock face rotating, you see how that opens and closes the face. That’s one way to open and close the face.

Another way to open and close the face is by moving my wrist backwards and forwards, kind of flipping my wrist.

So a lot of players get into the habit of flipping to go ahead and close that face. You see the more I flip, the more that face closes.

The more I have my hands this way like we started, the more that face is open. So we all get into the habit of opening and closing the face by doing this rather than twisting and rotating the face that way.

So let’s combat that by learning how to square the face through that rotation, then we can bring it on naturally much more simply, much more naturally onto the plane in the downswing, or on plane.

Let’s start by going to the top of the swing. What I want you to do is go ahead and go to the top and relax your arms. You don’t have to be tight here.

But I want you to imagine again, this clock face, if we can rotate that what would be to my right, the logo of my left hand going up toward the sky, the palm of my right hand going up toward the sky, my knuckles kind of rotating this way, that would be closing the face.

So you see as I came on down, that would be a closed club face. As I come through, that would be closing it to where it would be promoting much more of a hook or a draw.

I want you to do 20 reps. Just go to the top of your swing, do four or five feeling like you rotate that face closed, rotate it closed again. Get used to that feeling of rotating it closed, and then come back down to the bottom of the swing.

So you’re going to do four or five, get the feeling of that, and then go ahead and swing on through. What you’ll notice is, you’ll have a sensation that face is really closing down, so now it’s easier to get that club shallowing from the inside and you don’t have to worry about it going to the right at all.

We’re going to start out doing reps of five, closing, closing, closing, and then swinging through. Do a good 20 reps, or however many it takes you to feel comfortable with that. Then let’s pause halfway down.

I want to go just halfway down my swing, pause when my club’s about parallel with the ground, and now let’s close that face again three, four, five times until you get the feeling of that.

Start opening the hips as you would in the golf swing, and then go ahead and feel like you swing on through to get that nice draw.

Let’s do the opposite here for a second so you can feel the other extreme. If I come down this way and I open this face, open, open, now there’s two things that I could do to square this up.

I could start to come over the top, or I could flip my hands to try to save it. That open position is not going to be good. I need that club face to be square and closing as I’m making my downswing.

So again, four or five reps, swing on through to get the feel for that.

Once I’ve done those, I’ve felt the club face start to rotate at the top of the swing, I’ve felt the club face start to rotate at the bottom of the swing, now it’s starting to make complete sense how I could get the club in here on the slot and still get that face squared up as I’m coming through contact.

So your final reps, do four or five reps where now you get the club in here, really exaggerate that wrist action, that rotating of the club, and you’re going to feel completely comfortable getting the club way back in here and being comfortable that ball is going to turn over from right to left as you’re doing that.

Let’s do at least five reps at a time, it may be 20 reps to get comfortable at the top. 20 down here at the bottom, and let’s do another 20 shallowing that club out and pairing all that together.

If you can do all those, now you’re going to feel much more comfortable with how that club has to move, and you’re going to hit that great draw right from the slot.

OK, so where do we go from here? For those of you that are members of the website, we need to build on this feeling that we started today.

We talked about how we started to square this club face up, get it coming more from the inside, we need to make this automatic, though.

What I want you to do from here, go to the Instruction tab at the top of the Top Speed Golf website. Go to the Top Speed Golf System, and then click on The Move.

Now that’s going to lead you through a series of drills, a progression that build on what we talked about here today.

We’re going to learn how to square up that face. We’re going to learn how to shallow out that club, and make it all completely automatic so that we can get rid of that over the top, or that steep swing whether you’re hitting a slice or a hook.

We’ve got to get rid of that steep angle of the club so that we don’t have to manipulate that in the downswing, and things get a lot more consistent.

So jump over to The Move section, start to work through that from beginning to end, that’s going to solve a lot of your problems in the golf game.

Best of luck, and I’ll see you in The Move.